Monthly Archives: November 2016

Today, we are grateful, happy and excited to announce that we have reached the goal of €70,000 for our 2016 donation drive! The purpose of this year’s drive – for the OpenStreetMap project to secure its independence and financial security – clearly resonated with you as strongly as it does with us. The continued existence of OpenStreetMap as an independent source of free and open data is priceless, but money is needed to secure it nonetheless. With this €70,000, we will be able to continue maintaining our infrastructure and fund our very modest operational budget.

We would like to thank all 1900+ individual donors, as well as Mapbox, who helped us push this drive over the finish line with a €10,000 matching donation.

If you have not donated yet, you can still do so at donate.openstreetmap.org. Please know that donations in any amount are very welcome throughout the year!

Behind the scenes the editor code has been made more modular, helping future development and customisation. Bryan Housel has been leading the development effort. Read more on his blog post here. Big thanks to him and all the developers involved.

iD is the default editor appearing on the OpenStreetMap website when you click ‘edit’. Never tried? You’ll need to get signed up and logged in first. Follow the ‘walkthrough’ to learn how ‘iD’ works. This is improving all the time, but there’s also a range of desktop or mobile app alternatives. See the list of editors.

As I am writing this, our donation drive is just about to hit the €50k mark – we’re only €20k short of our goal now! Thank you everyone who has contributed until now.

And we have super exciting news: Our friends at Mapbox have decided that they will match the next €10k of donations 1:1 – this means that for every donation someone makes, Mapbox will give the same amount again. Which effectively means that we’re only €10k away from reaching our funding goal.

Mapbox have been a steady contributor to our donation drives, a recurring conference sponsor, and they’re also a corporate member of the OSM Foundation – and that’s not even counting non-monetary contributions like their work on the iD editor and other things in OSM.